Pinterest and Gender

As an active user of Pinterest, I thought it is nothing more than a tool to organize images, which should be gender neutral. However, demographic data shows in 2012, 83% of the US users were women. I was surprised at first but suddenly thought of all those wedding dresses, jewelries I saw during my daily update. And here’s my closer look.

I’m not sure whether female are more of visual creatures than guys, but it’s so easy to hear “oh this is pretty”, “it’s really cute” from a female. They are also enthusiastic shoppers and home decorators: sometimes satisfied by just looking around without buying anything. While guys more often do their shopping with a clear goal and looking more into functionality. It’s also women who tend to care more about whether they look good in photos and check their current “image” from mirrors, just like Cleo. Some study shows as early as four months old, baby girls can distinguish facial features and are able to distinguish between photos of people they know versus strangers. Baby boys are not able to do that. Even a brief look into the default categories Pinterest provides for people’s collection boards, seem to give us some hints: there are 32 categories in total, in a quick tag I did, there are 11 categories which are more “female” such as DIY & crafts, gardening, hair & beauty, while 7 are more “male”, such as cars & motorcycles, geek, science & nature. Female also “wins” on the Popular page of Pinterest, where you may see babies, panda sushis, women’s apparel and cute pancakes.

The popular page of Pinterest, accessed on April 16. Pinterest is a Virtual Pinboard, where people create “boards” (collections) and put “pins” (images) on it.

In the feminism chapter from the shoe book, Barnard mentioned “Feminism points out that there are gender differences and argues that the gendered position of the understanding subject has a part to play in, and makes a difference to, the understanding of understanding.” To some extent, the user of Pinterest is also creating their understanding of certain words (usually the title of their collection board), e.g. on User A’s board “Spring”, she not only put what people would normally put: flowers, but also pictures of Easter and St. Patrick’s Day, which shows she might be a religious person. The Spring collection might have influence in the following way (1) to other viewers, who has never thought from a holiday or religious perspective about spring, they may have more insights about the season now (2) shape the author’s own understanding of spring by consistent interaction with the board. It’s like the part and whole relationship we covered in previous class: the author’s “horizon” affects what she puts on the board named Spring, and what she put on the board (sometimes may be a random or suddenly inspired choice) will also cast influence on her understandings.

A collection named “Spring” (the St.Patrick Day picture is not shown in this screenshot)

When talking about the weakness of feminist is a gender-based approach to understanding visual culture is reductive. I randomly looked into 5 male and 5 female’s collections. There seems to be no big difference in quantity. But very “gender-biased” is the content, even under the same category they might have totally different pictures. For example, under “Travelling”, female users usually have pictures of flowers, landscape, but rarely boats; under “Architectures”, rarely do they post high-tech buildings as some guys do. It does appear to me gender-based understanding is reductive, because the filter of a woman’s eyes might keep the softer, more emotional staff, while the guy’s might retain the harder, more rational things. However, I don’t think it’s a weakness. Actually different individuals, groups, organizations, classes, should have distinct understanding towards the same thing. Feminist might look at the subject from a cultural perspective while scientist are studying the scientific formation or structure. It is such and such reductive understanding that come together to make it more holistic.

A male user’s (up) and a female user’s (down) collections with the same title “Home Home Home”

Shaowen’s paper pointed out “The interaction design process takes place independent of gender considerations, and even today the central concept of the whole field—the user—remains genderless.” I am curious whether the designers of Pinterest have thought about gender but I will not be surprised that the content of the default categories might have been changed according to what the users are putting up on their boards. If so, then it is a participatory process where the first release of the product can still be counted as part of the design phase. This is similar to the user-centered lane building process where people walk across a big lawn and stepped out a path, then the workers build the lanes accordingly. In that case, if more passers-by are female, the final lane should is more likely to be a female route (if there’s difference btw male and female about path picking).

A lawn in Stanford. The walking paths were built according to the people’s walking route on the original lawn (with out any path).

In Shaowen’s paper she also mentioned some qualities of feminist interaction:

Pluralism, which refers to “design artifacts that resist any single, totalizing, or universal point of view”, is well practiced in Pinterest. Though the functions are the same and quite limited, people turn to be creative and everyone’s boards are different.

Advocacy, which encourages designers to “question their own position to assert what an ’improved society’ is and how to achieve it”. I’m not sure if the designers have thought about the “good society” but though what people put up for topics like home, wedding, life, dream, it’s not hard to have a glimpse of at least a small group of people’s image of “good society”.

Self-disclosure, which refers to “the extent to which the software renders visible the ways in which it effects us as subjects”, is carried out by the function that the user can follow the whole collection of a person or a specific board.

I feel just by looking at what each individual has put up there can help me easily create a mood board about gender differences. Those collections cast light on things that women and men like respectively and would probably each be willing to spend effort on. It might face some harsh critique but I think it will be very interesting if we can filter the search result for a certain topic by gender. So far, it’s really hard to pick out males from random users because there are too few…

LifeWorlds as Self Image and from Self Image to Self Disclosure

This is long but I really wanted to share it all any way…these are my thoughts from many different readings piled into one…this helped me iron out some thoughts for my final writing…

This article by Flitterman talked about the “transformation” (268) of image. It captured its essence in the central question which had dual meanings: “how do I look?” (269). In this text it describes the transition from an “image constructed from the looks of men”…to an image based on “subjective vision” (269).

The self-image construction in this “story of femininity and its social representations…reveals as much about the character as about ourselves and the culture in which we live” (283). From this, what I saw in the “women-as-a-spectacle to women-as-a-social being” (273) is the transition out of a mirror representation to a lifeworlds representation. This was made more apparent in this statement: …”her subjective vision is rendered by an alternation of past, present, and imagined images, an alternation that intercuts people on the street” (275). This looked/sounds a lot like a hermeneutics circle and internal lifeword map made visible through film. She is meaning making through the life/objects/lives she has encountered.

Our social context, as I allude to above, is not only impacting our lifeworlds but our lifeworlds are possibly structuring our self-image… “How we look”.  Bardzell, in her six qualities of Feminist HCI, mentioned the concept of ecology which I think is very fitting in this case.  She “invites interaction designers to attend to the ways that design artifacts in-the-world reflexively design us (1307). Cleo’s montage of thoughts and images of the past and present and images is in my mind one level of self imaging.

I was curious in considering if we were able to extrapolate those internal thoughts made apparent by the film? What would that look like? I concluded that the what I am asking is similar to the self-disclosure use quality of Feminist HCI (1307).  So if we followed the film in applying “intercuts” of self disclosure, if we participated in the externalizing of the internal (Active theory in a Nutshell, 69), I thought about how the ecology around that artifact would respond. That response in my mind would be an artistic encounter (161) as expressed by Bourriauds in Rational Aesthetics.  

Taking this into a practical application, such as my personalized prosthetic interaction topic. I have found so many interesting applications and quite frankly a need for individuals to be able to construct a self-image. However, just as important there is a need to be able to articulate it—(i.e. have self-disclosure) in that participatory design process. There is a potential to have all personalized designs but I am leery of how many people are simply seeing how they look by the industrialization of culture and ideology—which would decrease the amount of personalization even though it is made possible—my rant (Kellner, 202).

Bespoke Innovations does what Feminist HCI advocates. In closing I would like to highlight it’s participatory design process. But a question that I feel this life world mapping challenges me to consider juxtapose this text of Cleo is the issue found in Active Theory. This issue of Self-Disclosure as mentioned by Bardzell.  This brings even more clarity to Nelson and Stolterman argument for a key element to the design process being communication (165). It is this issue of communicating effectively which can hinder the participatory design process.

I whole heartedly agree with the mandatory need for personalized design. I also see an equal need and requirement for designers to be very sensitive in those participatory design settings to be able to capture the essence of what is being conveyed verbally and nonverbally (by their co-partner of design) as that co-partner communicates/exposes their subjective vision—their self image, their lifeworld.

A Potential Answer to Jared’s Question

In Jareds lost post on ‘a question about feminism’ (which I too can’t access) he asked why, when you go to the highest level it reverts back to being controlled by men? I like this as a theological question but I will attempt to employ interactive concepts as well. 

So in response to your question, I would like to highlight the dominate thought and behavior that I think is being portrayed through this male ‘leadership’ observation. I would call your question a context clue (pun intended) of our “patriarchal culture” (Flitterman,283), from our reading for Thursday. 

What I am seeing is that we are situated within a context—a patriarchal stage. And the male recognition that you mention is a shadow of our overarching ideology. Dunn said design is a “link between two worlds [our imagination and the external world]” (xvii).  Kellner then highlighted that “technology produce[s] mass culture that habituate[s] individuals to conform to the dominant patterns of thought and behavior” (203).

If we and our social society are a product of “industrialization of mass produced culture” (Kellner, 202) than inadvertently we are ‘telling on ourselves’ through our social patriarchal structure of leadership, which you alluded to. What we are ‘telling’ and therefore projecting our ideologies (Keller), we are revealing our “hidden social and psychological mechanisms” (Dunn, xvi).

in the end this works out quite nicely for me that there was error 404 being that i needed to make a post lol

Response to Jared

So I have no idea what’s making WordPress so cranky this time, but – while I can clearly read Jared’s post about feminism in my email – whenever I click on the link it brings me to a 404Error. (Definitely not the droids I’m looking for.) So for context, this is a response to Jared’s post…

I like the example you chose specifically of chefs – a male dominated profession – that does seem to encroach on the supposed domain of women: cooking, nourishing, and so on. I think the difference falls to some of the binary distinctions Jeff discussed in class yesterday, particularly, art and craft. Cooking at home is a necessity – you must eat and feed your family in order to survive and thrive. Cooking professionally is a specialized trade; people don’t have to eat out, so when they choose to do so it needs to be a special experience. I think that this novelty is what sets the distinction. Women cooking at home is like knitting or darning or the various other female “crafts” – tasks that women complete as part of their daily, female routine. Men cooking professionally – receiving specialized training at Le Cordon Bleu, earning Michelin stars in recognition of culinary achievements – that’s an art. I think there is a (perceived) difference in the importance and status of cooking a healthy, affordable, easy meal for a family of four as part of your day-to-day, and cooking a seven course masterpiece for strangers, whether they be upscale diners or critics. I almost wonder if it is the nurturing component – providing for your husband and children – which seems so feminine, and contributes to this gap between “woman’s work” of cooking at home versus the male-dominated arena of professional chefs.

Great question!

Preferential treatment

Warning, past the first link, some of the things I have linked in this article are Not Safe for Work/School/Polite company in general. Especially the third link which goes to a website called Fat, Ugly or Slutty. I’m also not sure if this actually fits into the Feminism category…

So while I was looking for articles that could be used for the paper last week, I stumbled across this gem at Gamasutra. The article is about an upcoming MOBA game (multiplayer online battle arena) that is fashioned after League of Legends. I don’t know much about League of Legends, so correct me where I’m wrong (I’ve wanted to check it out, but haven’t had time yet), but it’s an MMO that is primarily PVP (player vs player). The company that is creating this new game (Prime World) is making it so that female players who buy female avatars and male players who buy male avatars not only pay less for those avatars, but teams made up of “mixed genders” get special bonuses in their game. Although this was originally reported in several locations as being a discount only offered to female players (including the Gamasutra link above, which is reflected by the quote taken from the Penny Arcade report), it’s seeming like maybe somewhere along the way the message was crossed, or changed. That in and of itself stirs up a whole mess of problems about sex, gender and identification, not to mention their way of “verifying” whether you’ve boy bits or girl bits (since that’s apparently all that matters) is by linking your Facebook to your account, which is totally foolproof. I can’t speak on the sex, gender and identification, but I can talk about why being forced to identify myself to a game world as a woman is something that entirely turns me off of this game.

First, in order to get the “mixed gender bonuses,” I’m assuming by what little information I’ve found that you actually have to be a girl playing a girl matched up in a team with at least one boy playing a boy. That being said, I’ve lost a part of my anonymity as a gamer that I’ve so greatly taken for granted up until this article brought it to my attention. I realize that, as an MMO player, when teamed up with people who do not know me, and who do not have any access to anything beyond my online avatar, I come off as more or less genderless. I tend to not talk a lot in games like World of Warcraft, at least not to people I know. The few times I’m in a PUG (pick up group), I keep my talking short and to the point if the group is more than half full with strangers, and even then most of my chattiness goes on guild chats rather than party so the third party is never privy to them. The few strangers we’ve picked up long term have never asked me if I was a girl, and until recently, never knew or cared. Now they know, but only because I logged on over the weekend to stalk them until they logged on and asked them, “Am I a boy or a girl?” Most responded with “I don’t know?” So I had to push them until I got a response. Two said, “I’m assuming you’re a girl because your avatar’s a girl,” and one followed that up with, “but, I’m a guy and my avatar’s a chick.” Three decided I was a boy. One said it didn’t matter, and they didn’t want to know. Most of them admitted that they hadn’t even thought about it. I was just another person they enjoyed playing a game with.

So why do I care so much about my anonymity as a female gamer? Because I get tired of “get back in the kitchen” jokes from those gamers who do care. And those aren’t the only “jokes” I’ve gotten to hear or deal with, and I’m not alone in that regard. One time while playing a FPS game online (Battlefield: Bad Company 2), I had a guy who after figuring out I was a girl demanded I talk dirty over chat for him, and after refusing spent the whole rest of the battle team killing me. He even rejoined after the game kicked him for excessive team kills (a programed function to stop griefers), and annoyed the entire team to the point where they trapped him in a room and killed/rezzed him until half of them were booted as well. I’ve gotten messages like the ones seen in the link above, pictures of male genitals, etc. But on WoW, where I run around as both a male and female avatar, I’ve never disclosed my gender (until recently), and I’ve only ever had a problem with creepy messages once or twice in the entire five-six years I’ve been playing as compared to my once monthly (or weekly when I’m playing more often) as via Xbox with my female avatar.

I was more angry with this article when I first read it because the benefits were only for women, and they would have to play female avatars to get them. I felt that it would backfire on them in that male players would feel like women would be getting preferential treatment outside of the in game bonuses, and that it would have a negative impact on the women’s gaming experience. I’m not sure if the PA report had the facts wrong, or if the huge outpouring of negative reviews about the article made the creators of the game look back and see what they did wrong.

It’s been compared twice to ladies night at the bars, but my thoughts are that it isn’t like that at all. Sure both are offering discounts to encourage more women to participate in activities, but that’s more or less where the similarities stop. Some men benefit from there being more women at bars because the go to the bars to find women. I don’t know of many guys who jump on their MMOs to pick up dates in the middle of a battlefield online.

Ray Eames, marginalized

The readings also reminded me of Charles and Ray Eames: The Architect and the Painter, a film available on Netflix streaming. Ray and Charles Eames were a design team. As the film shows, Ray was marginalized in the media as an assistant to Charles, when she was more of a design partner. This could have been due to the fact that she had lady parts. It could have been due her expertise in painting contrasted to the hard (harder?) science of architecture. The title of the movie itself shows bias, or at least continues the marginalization of women and painters: Ray is listed second to Charles. How would people react if the title was Ray and Charles Eames: The Painter and the Architect?

Fashion is a pervasive design too

Musician Moby was featured in the most recent podcast of KCRW’s Design and Architecture. He talks about the motivation behind his LA architecture blog, stating that the reason he likes architecture is because it’s the one field of design that affects your life 24 hours a day. I think that’s an overstatement. It’s easy to think about situations not affected by architecture (camping immediately comes to mind). Further, I think it disregards fields of design like fashion. This really made me think about our readings in feminism. What institutions are considered important? Architecture is considered more important by Moby. He rationalizes this by saying it affects our lives everyday. Yet both fashion and architecture affect our lives everyday. We all choose our clothes and use them as a means of self-expression. That seems very important and pervasive.

Bespoke part two

So I fell in love with Bespoke Innovations as  I mentioned last week.  I believe there are multiple angles to approach this from:

1. I thought this approach could lend itself to discussing the significance of Aesthetic Coherency of the artifact. I thought this approach while critically looking at within the Ideological and genera lenses would afford the opportunity to discuss: the designer, the designed for, and community response based on our Tyson Reading page 182.  Lars-Erik Janlert and ERIK Stolterman in the Character of things on pg 300 said: “In ascribing a certain character to an artifact we make a very simple, but powerful description that frequently will be accurate enough to help us to manage the task of handling the artifact and to appreciate the consequences of our interaction with it.”
2. Subjectivity that impacts the Objective.
3. Sculpting your life world.

the last two arent too flushed out…but I just wanted to give you something…

Feminism and Pinterest

Pinterest is getting a lot of love in the tech community. It’s had skyrocket success and unlike most startups didn’t start with early-adopter techies. They started with women, many who are collecting images for their weddings, closets, recipes, etc.

In the article below Nathan Jurgenson discusses Feminism and Pinterest. The post debates about the following topics:

- fundamental differences between men and women
- lack of misogynistic content
- Its juvenile version of women that appeals to a ‘domestic’ woman

What is the discussion to have about feminism and pinterest? Is Nathan asking the right questions? What discussion needs to be had? Are there other sites or digital projects related to pinterest and feminism? Discuss…

http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2012/03/05/pinterest-and-feminism/

Defamiliarization, Feminism, and The Contrarian Model

In her paper Feminist HCI: Taking Stock and outlining an Agenda for Design, Shaowen Bardzell makes the claim that “feminist HCI entails critical perspectives that could help reveal unspoken values within HCI’s dominant research and design paradigms and underpin the development of new approaches, methods, and design variations.” She states that “feminist approaches can integrate seamless and productively in all stages of the design process including user research, prototyping, and evaluation” [1]. I’d like to explore this idea of revealing values through feminist HCI by leveraging the idea of defamiliarization, particularly in user research.

Feminism

“Academically, feminism is often seen as a domain of critical theory that examines ‘the ways in which literature (and other cultural productions) reinforces or undermines the economic, political, social, and psychological oppression of women’” [1]. Interaction design is a cultural production and is ubiquitous in this digital age.

At it’s core, feminism is rooted in the idea of challenging assumptions and power relationships between groups. Feminism takes into account agency, fulfillment, identity and the self, equity, empowerment, Diversity, and social justice.” Feminism is often focused on gender, however it has qualities and aspects that can carry over into marginalized users, or users in general.

Shaowen also discusses feminist standpoint theory. Much of this deals with gender but I’d like to pull out a few general ideas from this theory. The theory “begins with the supposition that all knowledge attempts are socially situated and some are better than others as starting points for knowledge.” it also “advocates for the use of women’s viewpoints and experiences as an alternative point of departure for social science research” [1]. I was particularly drawn to this theory and will expand on it later on in this post.

Shaowen also proposed 6 use qualities for feminist HCI: pluralism, participation, advocacy, ecology, embodiment, and self-disclosure.

Defamiliarization

In the foundations to HCI course, we read a paper by Genevieve Bell, Mark Blythe, and Phoebe Sengers titled Making by Making Strange: Defamilarization and the Design of Domestic Technologies.  The historical, social and political issues surrounding the home are also often coupled with gender roles, so domestic technology is an area where feminism seems like a naturally applicable theory. This papers argues that making things that are familiar (such as the home) seem strange can open the design space to designers. Feminism is actual brought up several times in this paper including using feminism to critique domestic technology, the design process, and the “means of gathering the data that informs design.”

Defamiliarization can be seen in literature as “a literary device that compels the reader to examine their automated perceptions of that which is so familiar that it seems natural and unquestionable” [2]. It’s also been used in anthropology  particularly within ethnographic practices.

This paper calls for the “need to find strategies to identify and break out of the cultural metaphors dominating current [...] design” and claims that “by questioning the assumptions inherent in the design of everyday objects that HCI has always up design spaces, pointing towards better and more innovative designs.” Ethnography is one method used to do this as well as using extreme personas to see other perspectives of a user.

The authors claim that defamiliarization is not explicitly a scientific method, but rather a lens to see design practices in a new way. The article suggests that defamiliarization can provide ”alternative view points on assumptions in the design itself.”

Defamiliarization & Feminism

Defamiliarization is all about taking a new, fresh perspective in order to question what you thought was natural, unquestionable, and assumed. Things that are taken for granted and assumed to be understood are questions and reexamined from a different view point. This is an example of the afore-mentioned feminist viewpoint theory which talks about the use of women’s (a marginalized demographic in many cases) perspective as a different starting point for knowledge in social science research.

The Contrarian  Model

The Contarian Model came about through a project done with Robert, Sam S, and Ravi for Erik’s Design Theory Course. We were given the task of coming up with a design process model. Our team focused on brainstorming and concepting through a method involving looking at your problem from a completely different perspective. An example of this model might illustrate it best:

A team of 3 designers is designing a concept trying to encourage college students to walk more. They have collected data on college students through surveys, ethnographic observation, and interviews. From this data they collected insights about what motivates and discourages people to walk as well as some of the issues with types of transportation around campus. The team all has a common understanding of these researching findings and insights. They are at the stage in their design process where they are going to begin concepting. Over the course of the project, a few of the designers have had concept ideas and made rough sketches of them but little to no formal brainstorming or sharing has occurred.

The team gathers in a room with whiteboards and markers. They have set aside around an hour to do some brainstorming using the Contrarian Model. The team works together to quickly list out some of the key findings, insights, and design requirements they have considered so far in the project process. The team works together to throw out these ideas and record it on the board. They take about 10 minutes to do this activity. The outcome is a list of short phrases and words on the side of a whiteboard.

Next, each of the team members take a marker and starts to come up with a list of insights and design requirements that are contrary to the previous list. They start doing this individual for a few minutes (around 5 ) then take another 5-10 minutes to discuss and brainstorm a few extra contrary requirements. The team knows that the key goal  here is to flip the previous knowledge and in a way, defamilarize themselves with what they know and some of the concepts they have already developed through the research and insights phase. The team has a lot of fun with this, citing things like chairs that make sure you don’t need to move at all from the movie Wall-E and other enjoyable. They laugh a lot and try to come up with requirements that would make the lives of walkers awful and encourage people to be sedentary.

The team breaks as individuals, sketching ideas based on the contrary requirements on whiteboards and on paper/in sketch books. The team takes about 15 minutes to come up with out of the box concepts. Some of the concepts included ways to punish walkers, to discourage walking, to encourage non-active modes of transportation, and to make driving in cars around campus more enjoyable and convenient. There is a lot of joking and some sharing of concepts, even though the sketching is occurring individually. Two of the team members bounce funny concepts off of each other as they sketch variations of the same general idea.

The team has around 15 minutes left of their meeting. They each share their contrary concepts with one another pointing out features and which of the contrary requirements each concept addresses. At the end, they notice that patterns developed and the team noted that they should be sure to avoid these in their designs. The team works together and brainstorms a few concepts which are contrary to the contrary concepts. One member  jokes that this is one of the few cases where “two wrongs make a right”. These new concepts address the issues of the original list of requirements and insights derived from the data. However, because they have used this method of contrary concept development they were able to see  (and avoid in their concepting) some previously unforeseen issues. They were also able to come up with very creative and out of the box concepts which they wouldn’t have other wise thought of based on this activity.

The team proceeds with concepting. In a few cases they refer back to their contrary concepts as a tool to find issues in their concepting logic as well as to get new ideas flowing within the group. One team member comes up with a really good concept but then decided to take it one step further and design a contrary concept. This allows him to see some flaws in his concept so he re concepts his idea, improving on his first.

The team decides on a concept and proceeds with the design process.

In a previous post, I talked about my capstone and how I’m using a form of participatory design. I’m researching adults and children who are adjusting to a divorced family situation. This is often an emotionally charged and complicated situation for all of the family members – it’s a sensitive subject and, as I try to recruit, I find that most people don’t want to talk about something that is not very pleasant to discuss. I’m using a variation participatory design as one of my methods. Rather than have participants design an ideal system to help manage co-parenting, I’m having participants design the worst possible system ever. My rationale behind this is that I can see key issues in the scheduling process based on what they find to be the worst solutions. I can find these insights without having to ask for personal antidotes that may be difficult or uncomfortable for the participant to discuss. By taking a Contarian approach to the research method of participatory design, I’ve encouraged users to defamiliarize themselves from a situation, much like the designers who would use this method to brainstorm.

So, what?

In the Barnard book, there are several strengths and weaknesses of feminism. One of the weaknesses is that “a gender-based approach is reductive.” [3]. By using defamiliarization, which is already a feminist approach, with participatory design as a research method, you can get past this weakness of feminism as reductive. Instead, I think a researcher can gather more emergent data but through a feminist lens.

Thoughts?

[1] Bardzell, S. (2010) Feminist HCI: Taking Stock and Outlining An Agenda for Design

[2] Bell, G, M. Blythe, P. Sengers. (2005). Making by Making Strange: Defamiliarization and the Design of Domestic Technologies.

[3] Barnard, Malcolm. (2001). Approaches to Understanding Visual Culture. New York: Palgrave